“It’s going to be agony waiting until Thursday.”
I might be fourteen years old, but even to me, a kid, their words to each other sounded dumb.Gag me with a spoon,Hayward would have said. The two of them talked like characters from one of Prudence’s soap operas.
“You know this is crazy, don’t you?” she said.
“If this is crazy, I don’t ever want to be sane.”
Then came more breathing, followed by what was probably the sound of kissing. A book falling off the shelf. A few of them. Nervous laughter.
“We’d better get out of here before we get in trouble with the librarian,” he whispered. “You know librarians.”
“I don’t know anything anymore. I just know I have to be with you.”
“You will be, darling,” he told her.
This last part was what startled me.
“Forever?” she asked him.
“I’ve never felt like this about anyone, ever,” he said.
“I want to spend my life with you,” she said. “We’ll figure out a way, right?”
Based on the sounds emanating from their section of the library stacks, it seemed Forrest agreed with her.
I stayed in the stacks for a few more minutes, until I was sure the two of them had left. I got my book and brought it to the front desk.
“You’re quite a little reader, aren’t you?” the librarian asked me, stamping the well-used copy ofChristine.“You’ve become one of our best customers.”
“I really like Stephen King books,” I told her.
“You work for the Emersons, right?” she said. “You just missed Forrest. What a sweetheart.”
A look came over her. The librarian was on the older side, but the thought occurred to me that maybe she had a history with Forrest too, long ago.
“He was picking up a book for his wife,” she said. Back to librarian mode. “She’s not a well woman, I gather. He’s such a caring husband.”
Outside, I hopped on Buttercup and headed in the direction of the house. But I couldn’t go back there yet. Until this moment, I hadn’t fully accepted what Regina had told me about Forrest’s affairs. I’d held out a slim hope that she could be wrong about Forrest and Brenda. I might have told myself it wasn’t Forrest’s fault women chased after him all the time. He was just being nice.
What I felt now, pumping my bicycle up the long hill toward the road leading to the lake—standing up on the pedals, tears coming so hard I could barely see in front of me—was an emotion I had not registered before. Not toward Forrest, anyway. I wasn’t just hurt. I was angry.
When Regina confided in me about her husband’s summer liaisons, she described them as if they meant nothing. “It’s like a sport for Forrest,” she’d told me. “Sometimes he plays tennis. Sometimes he golfs.Sometimes he fools around with somebody’s wife. When the summer’s over, he’s mine again. He’s always mine in the end. Forrest isn’t going anywhere.”
What I’d overheard at the library told me otherwise. To hear Brenda talk—and not just Brenda, but Forrest himself—the two of them seemed to be embarking on a serious all-out love affair. With a future that went beyond Labor Day.
Brenda believed she’d be with Forrest forever.
He had not disputed the idea.
What did I know about love affairs? Nothing beyond what I’d picked up at the movies and in a few books. But nobody could have mistaken the tone of Brenda’s voice as she talked about their upcoming get-together as that of a woman interested in nothing more than a casual flirtation. And then there was Forrest. He sounded like a drunk person, but not the kind of drunk I was familiar with. Drunk on love. Or sex, anyway.
I had pedaled Buttercup halfway around the lake now, and up into the hills above Lake Catherine. My legs were sore, and it had started to rain, but I couldn’t turn back. I had to calm down first and figure out what to say when I got back to the house and saw Regina.
Was I supposed to keep this new information to myself? The truth was that even after Regina had explained to me about Forrest’s summer flings, he had remained my favorite person in the universe—as opposed to her, a woman it was hard to feel affection for. But she and I had become allies now. Regina wasn’t the only person Forrest had cheated on.
This was when I discovered what rage felt like. It seemed to me that in addition to having betrayed his not-particularly-lovable wife, the man I loved more than anything had betrayed me, personally. Every kindness he’d shown me—playing me Creedence Clearwater and Bob Seger tapes in the car on our long drive from New Jersey up to the lake, letting me steer the boat, hitting golf balls with me on a driving range in the last light of day, bringing me along in the Porsche to pick upstrawberries at the farm stand and eating the whole box in the car on the way home while we talked about my dream of becoming a writer, telling me I was part of the family now and that I had an amazing life ahead of me—all that had been a lie. I was a sucker and a loser to have imagined he ever cared about me.
He probably made fun of me to his girlfriend. “Can you believe our babysitter’s in love with me?” he’d say. “That flat-chested little girl who plays with my daughter’s dolls?”
